Monthly Archives: October 2016

As our presidential candidates lay out their visions and identify what they believe are the major issues on our national and global horizons, I thought I would publish a short list of my own. Obviously there are many, many things we could be doing differently – and many different things we probably should be doing – as we look to the future and contemplate the big picture of where we are headed. My list holds just three, but I think that together they constitute an axis for a revolution of creative change.

Fuel

The vast majority of us who enjoy the convenience of flipping switches or turning keys and having power delivered instantly where we need it, don’t typically worry about the source, supply, purity, and sustainability of the energy we use – that is, until something interrupts on our demand. It’s one of those things that make it possible for just about everything else to operate, and it’s these many things (devices, tools, machines, vehicles) that get our attention when they stop working. But where the power comes from (source), how much of it is available (supply), to what degree its production and use generates pollutants (purity), and how long its supply can be expected to last (sustainability) – such questions only rarely cross our mind.

Most of the machines we have come to depend on around the globe are powered by fossil fuels, combustible material derived from the remains of former living things. Fossil fuels (oil, coal, natural gas) are typically deep underground, which means that they are subject to property and access rights, and require expensive equipment to reach them. And who owns the land? Not the homeless poor or working classes. Governments and wealthy corporations – those who make the laws and lobby for special exceptions – coexist as a system and conspire together in shaping the economy in service to their interests.

Inevitably, the governing and wealthy classes prefer things to stay the same (hence they are conservative as a rule), since the way things are supports their privilege and control. Despite the fact that fossil fuels are a limited fuel source and highly toxic to the atmosphere and environment, production continues unabated. In fact, new stores are being drilled and mined to meet the growing worldwide demand. What are we supposed to do, stop driving our cars, lighting our homes, or pull the plug on manufacturing? The current energy grid is designed to power our many machines, and more machines are being manufactured every day, and these depend on the grid to work.

Alternative fuels – e.g., solar, wind, wave, and hydrogen – represent a virtually infinite source, widely available, perfectly clean, and sustainable far into the future. Already today, the technology exists for harnessing energy from the sun and powering our homes, neighborhoods, even entire cities. There is no more plentiful energy supply, available from nearly every location on Earth. Thankfully this technology is making it to the market, however slowly, partly through the efforts of fossil-fuel corporations that are expanding their production portfolios, and partly despite the best effort of others to stop it. A reduction in consumer use (driving less, using public transportation, biking and walking when we can), along with a commitment to purchase cleaner technologies and invest in the companies developing them, is critical to our big-picture and long-term future.

Food

Earth is an incredibly fertile and fruitful planet, and life has been able to adapt and evolve in its oceans, forests, deserts, tundra, prairies, mountains, marshes, lakes and streams. Even at our present population size of 7 billion, the earth’s bounty is more than sufficient to feed all of us. The problem, once again, is not really in the short supply of what we need, but in the political and commercial systems that prevent nutritious food (and clean water) from getting to those who need it.

The privileged classes (and the government their money buys) exploit and exhaust Earth’s food resources, supercharging the soil with fertilizers as they sterilize it with pesticides and herbicides. As a consequence of such practices, the mass yield at harvest increases dramatically while its nutritional value plummets. As huge amounts of methane (a greenhouse gas) are released into the atmosphere from livestock, these chemical toxins leech into the groundwater and lace our fruits, grains, and vegetables, slowly sickening us with cancers and other so-called auto-immune diseases.

The poor quality of highly processed and modified foods means that we have to eat more as we continue to fall below our nutritional needs. Eating more, of course, involves taking in more calories, and excessive calorie intake leads to weight gain, metabolic fatigue and dysfunction, and ultimately to diabetes and other disease processes. A growing interest in organic farming and whole foods is a promising trend, but a simultaneous return (think of it as a homecoming) to the natural intelligence of our body and its deep preference for nutritious and energy-rich foods will be necessary as well.

Faith

Other members in my weekly Wisdom Circle gathering are reasonably suspicious of the term ‘faith’, and they guard against what they anticipate will be my attempts to pull them back into the religions they left behind. It’s critically important to distinguish the doctrinal orthodoxy or belief system of a religion from the question of whether and to what degree an individual is able to relax into being and trust in the provident nature of reality.

I’m not speaking of Providence in the old-style Puritan sense, referring to the watchful protection and abundant provision of a god above or ahead of us. Instead, the provident nature of reality is based on the straightforward and obvious perception that our life, consciousness, creativity, and aspirations are not separate from the universe but manifestations of it. You and I are living expressions of a provident reality, as evidenced in the fact that its 14-billion-year process has brought about the conditions (on this planet, at least) for us to evolve and flourish, as part of a great community of life.

The faith I’m speaking of is not the property of any religion and has nothing to do with belief in god. As an inner release to the grounding mystery of being, faith opens us to existence and is our surrender to the deeper and larger process moving through us. Other words, such as oneness, communion, presence, grace, and peace, serve equally well – or poorly, insofar as the mystery they name is ineffable. When faith is active, we enjoy an inner peace and can reach out without a need to grasp, control, or manipulate others and the world around us. We can instead be present, attentive, mindful, caring, and generous.

When faith is inactive or missing, however, a profound dis-ease troubles us. We feel unsupported by reality, which in turn compels us to attach ourselves to anyone and anything (including ideologies) that promises some reassurance, relief, or escape. Of course, nothing outside us can compensate for inner insecurity. When we were infants, the intimate connection between safety and nourishment that we experienced in the nursing embrace perhaps encouraged a strong correlation in our minds between faith and food. This cross-wiring of our nervous system explains why we often seek comfort more than real nourishment in what we eat, and why the marketing of ‘comfort food’ is so wildly successful in our Age of Anxiety.

My axis of terms – Fuel, Food, and Faith – is arranged in that order to confirm what should be obvious to us all. If we can’t move to cleaner energy sources and break free of our dependency on fossil fuels, our planet’s warming climate will turn soil to sand, shrinking the area of tillable land worldwide. If we can’t farm food that is wholesome and nutritious, we will need to eat more and more of it, compromising the global supply and bringing upon ourselves a growing number of health complications. But if we can’t transform the politics that drive the decisions and divide us along lines of wealth, race, gender, and creed, the brighter future we hope for may be out of reach.

Our politics will change as people change, as we learn how to cultivate inner peace. The future of humanity starts now, with you and me.

The essential function of mythology is to link together individual consciousness (psyche; psychology) and the larger order of existence (cosmos; cosmology). Its collection of sacred stories provides the orientation, guidance, connection, and support that we need for success in the project of constructing meaning and living well. Because this project is profoundly (i.e., deeply) social, the myths were never ‘mere stories’ on the shelf for leisure reading, but great epic narratives to be recited and performed in the context of community life.

That is, until fairly recently.

As the advance of science inevitably altered our model of reality, the sacred myths which had draped and adorned this framework fell steadily out of relevance, and then soon afterwards, out of fashion as well. Without an alignment between our narrative constructions of mythology and our changing understanding of the universe, the sacred stories either had to be updated accordingly; discarded and forgotten; turned into allegories of hidden (metaphysical) secrets; or taken literally as journalistic accounts of supernatural revelations and miraculous events.

Another option would be to more directly engage the challenge of linking consciousness and existence in order to create a relevant mythology for our time. It likely won’t be about a literal heaven and hell, but rather about outer space and inner ground, the global neighborhood and sustainable community, planetary stewardship and a more perfect union.

To help in this effort, I offer an image for our consideration. The diagram above incorporates a medieval painting of the three realms – heaven, earth, and hell – a mental model widely held throughout the ancient world as depicting the structure of reality. The specific divine, human, or demonic personalities inhabiting these three realms, along with the sacred storylines (myths) that crisscrossed and weaved them together, differed, of course, from one culture and historical period to the next. My intention is not to explore and interpret the individual myths, but only to use this structural design of three realms in a way that might contribute meaningfully to a mythology for our secular and global age.

Just as the ancients understood, our experience unfolds in the middle realm of daily life. Our attention, energy, and effort get directed into those activities and concerns that conspire toward a general sense of meaning. Although we possess an animal nature in our body and its primal instincts, the special concern of human consciousness is with the affairs and challenges of our life together in community. This is where our identities are shaped and instructed with the tribe’s worldview and cache of wisdom for how to make it in the world.

Ego consciousness – the separate center of personal identity whose dual ambition to belong and be recognized, to fit in and stand out at the same time, generates both external and internal conflicts – is thus the principal denizen of this middle realm.

In another blog of mine, less philosophical and more therapeutic, I provide a simple yet highly useful schematic of 5 Domains for looking at life as a whole but also moving into the details for making the changes we desire. A recent post, titled Creators and Reactors, offered the image of a tree as a way of understanding the 5 Domains and their holistic integration.

Each of the 5 Domains holds a relatively small set of basic obligations that must be fulfilled on a regular basis in order to optimize the quality of life in that domain. For example, an optimized spirituality requires that we give time to quiet reflection and finding our way to that still place at the center of our existence (which I call The Clearing) through such meditation practices as mindful breathing, contemplation, and centering prayer. A calm body and centered mind are conducive to an inner release to the grounding mystery and its ineffable intuition of oneness.

Without such practices – or worse, through the uncontrolled spin-out in frantic or mindless activity – our spirituality doesn’t get the investment it needs to be the nourishing root system of our life.

The middle realm, then, is where we either take responsibility for the variety of obligations across our 5 Domains, or otherwise neglect them, ignore them, avoid them, and put them off till ‘later’. But here we are: faced with the things that need our attention, standing at a ‘Y’ in our path. Depending on the choice we make at this point, our consciousness and quality of life will either shift upward or downward, into an upper realm or a lower realm, heaven or hell.

Once again, I am not using these terms as references to different locations in the universe, and not even as metaphysical dimensions of reality. Instead, they are meant to indicate distinct registers of consciousness – moods, motivations, attitudes, and perspectives (in short, mindsets) – that link psyche and cosmos by very different stories and contrary mythologies.

So that we can end this post on a positive note, let’s begin with the descent into hell.

Hell

When we are irresponsible with the obligations of wellbeing, not taking care of the things that elevate our quality of life across the 5 Domains, our general picture begins to degenerate into something quite unpleasant. Remember those simple practices of spirituality that deepen our sense of inner peace? When we neglect or avoid them, the opposite of inner peace takes its place: insecurity. Instead of releasing our separate identity (ego) to the grounding mystery within, we desperately struggle to keep from falling into the abyss of extinction.

Let’s play this all the way out.

Our spiritual insecurity signals the body to release stress hormones, keeping us hypervigilant and defensive, but also suspending metabolic and immunity functions in the interest of emergency action. And when we’re all neurotic and knotted up in this way, how does it go in our relationships? Not well. We tend to be reactive, suspicious, distrustful, and self-absorbed. We also pull other equally neurotic partners into our life, forming dysfunctional and codependent attachments that serve to confirm and reinforce our general anxiety over the state of things. The problem here is that our character continues to be shaped and instructed in this negative social milieu, which means that we become takers and consumers, grasping for our share and ripping into anyone who threatens our stash. Finally, as it concerns our lifeplan and vision for the future – well, there’s just no energy or time for that. Holding off the next catastrophe has become our full-time obsession.

I think that’s a pretty good description of hell, don’t you? The urgency of a life out of balance and collapsing upon itself; a hostage of our own convictions, a captive of destructive forces, bound by fear and feeling stuck in a hole that just keeps getting deeper. Hell is the deepest of all depressions.

Or … we might choose the other way.

Heaven

Taking responsibility in the obligations of wellbeing means that we don’t wait around for someone else to live our life or save us from our problems. We do what is necessary and required in order to optimize our quality of life in all 5 Domains. We cultivate inner peace, make healthy choices, love others (even those who oppose us), serve the greater good, and relentlessly pursue a more perfect union.

Heaven really isn’t that far away. Indeed it’s been right here all the time, just waiting for us to enter. As Jesus says in the Gospel of Luke, “The kingdom of God is within/among you” (Luke 17:21). All the great wisdom teachers of history are in fundamental agreement on one thing: When we know the truth, the truth will make us free.

Most of us have had the experience of getting our vision diagnosed by an optician. A fancy instrument, called a phoropter, is maneuvered in front of our face and positioned on the bridge of our nose. As the technician clicks various lenses over each eye and we try to read some letters or view a scene, we are asked to judge which of two clicks makes the picture more distinct. Eventually we arrive at the specific power of refraction that will compensate for the weakness and astigmatism of our unaided eyesight.

If we think of the phoropter as a metaphor for culture and the way it clicks various lenses between our minds and reality, we have a useful illustration of constructivism. The basic idea is that our minds do not merely look for and find meaning in reality, but instead they make meaning by constructing a model of reality and using this model as a frame for draping the stories, theories, judgments and expectations that constitute our personal worlds. I’m using ‘worlds’ in the plural because each of us manages a world unique to us (so we all have one), and we also progress through a variety of distinct worlds (or worldviews) over the course of our lifetime.

In a recent discussion with others in the wisdom circle I attend, we were reflecting on the different worlds of the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States, and the profound differences between our Western world and the worlds of other cultures and nations. From the ancient Greeks we inherited our accent on the individual as a separate and irreducible center of identity, dignity, sentiment, and agency. Perhaps as an effect of the fact that the Greco-Roman culture overarched a wide region of numerous indigenous societies, the detached and self-standing individual became the locus of supreme value. After the ‘dark age’ of medieval Europe, this priority of the individual reasserted itself with the Renaissance ideal of the hero-artist.

Other cultures, both ancient and contemporary, view reality through a different lens from that of Western individualism. Instead of looking at the collective through a preference for the individual, they define an individual through the lens of community. It’s not that the individual is unimportant; rather, the individual only makes sense as a function of the whole. Self-sacrifice on behalf of one’s community takes precedence over competition among individuals for self-advancement.

Not only might competition of this sort be discouraged in community-oriented cultures, such a mentality and behavior will likely be condemned, even punished by banishment from the group. A Western individual is apt to condemn this attitude in turn as both repressive and ignorant, since a community exists for the sake of individuals and not the other way around.

Not all Westerners are individualists, and we could surely find many individualists within the more community-oriented cultures of our day. The point is not to draw a geographical or even a cultural boundary between the two types, but to reflect for ourselves as to which lens holds priority for us. As we view reality and construct our worlds, which lens is in front of the other? Our first lens (the one in front) will automatically filter and qualify the other, as the core beliefs by which we construct our worlds and live our lives.

The answer is probably more complicated than my question leads us to think.

When the individual is before (i.e., in front of the lens of the) community, typically the rights of the individual will take precedence over his or her responsibilities to the community. In my recent post The Great American Divide I suggested that capitalism, as one of the seedbed traditions beneath the American world(view), is based on a philosophical preference for the individual over the community. According to this view, a community is essentially a collective of individuals seeking economic opportunities that will support and promote their personal ambitions. This is not to say that capitalism necessarily breeds selfishness in its devotees, but Adam Smith did affirm ‘rational self-interest’ as one of its driving forces (competition being the other).

A preference for the individual over community keeps the tether of moral values firmly staked to a concern for the benefits and risks to the self. If altruism plays any part, then it’s in the form of what the communitarian philosopher Philip Selznick calls ‘bounded altruism’ (The Moral Commonwealth, 1994). Here the outreach of individuals extends to familiars and fellow members, but not to strangers or outsiders. The reciprocal turnaround of value back to the individual needs to be fairly short in order to justify one’s investment, charity, or sacrifice on behalf of others. Generally speaking, commitments of this kind to strangers or outsiders do not bring reciprocal value to the benefactor – a liability for which American capitalism offers compensation in its provision of tax write-offs for donations.

On the other hand, when community is before (i.e., in front of the lens of) the individual, a responsibility to the greater good sets constraints around individual rights. This doesn’t mean that individuals can be arbitrarily stripped of property and freedoms whenever it serves the collective interest, which is how individualists often paint the problem. Granted, when the collective is really little more than an aggregate of individuals under the control of a dictator or special-interest bureaucracy, the individual – particularly those at the bottom or outside the circle of power – is, we might say, perfectly expendable. History has shown this time and again.

So obviously we need to be more careful in the way we define ‘community’. It is decidedly not merely a synonym for the collective, that essentially disconnected aggregate of individuals mentioned above. A community (literally “together as one”) represents a qualitative shift in consciousness where the self-other reciprocity and competition of capitalism is transcended (included and surpassed) in the experience of empathy, advocacy, and communion. The individual is not subtracted or subordinated, but rather honored and lifted into this higher consciousness of community life.

Again, in my post The Great American Divide I made a case that democracy, as the second seedbed tradition beneath our American worldview, is based on a philosophical preference for the community over the individual. For Jefferson and other framers of the US Constitution, this order of priority meant that individuals are not essentially competing units of self-interest; rather they are self-transcending agents in the synergy of ‘a more perfect union’. With its emphasis on our individual responsibilities to the community, this tradition of American liberal democracy insists that our rights as individual citizens are only defensible within a larger culture where individuals work together for the common good.

So what I earlier called the ‘great American divide’ turns out to be a fundamental dilemma posed to each of us. As we step into our creative authority, it is up to us to decide which of these lenses has priority to the other. Each commitment provides some counterbalance to the other, and in their tension is where we must construct a life of meaning.

The biggest problem for Republicans these days is that their 2016 presidential candidate is not a Republican. He is by name, of course; Donald Trump’s name is on the GOP ticket. But Trump apparently has little understanding of or regard for the principles of civility and decency, cooperation and respect, dialogue and compromise, ethical leadership and responsibility, temperance and self-sacrifice on behalf of ‘we the people’ – in other words, little understanding or regard for the foundations of liberal democracy.

As the circus approaches election day, even Republicans are offended and embarrassed, poised now to renounce their candidate in the interest of our nation’s future. How did he get this far? How was it possible that a dozen or so much more qualified contenders got pushed off the stage – a few of them viciously maligned and forced (or so it must have felt) into some mud-slinging of their own? A few reputations and political prospects were not only injured but maybe even permanently wrecked in the fray.

I have a theory.

In evolution there is a force at work that Darwin named ‘natural selection’, which has to do with the ongoing necessity of living things to maintain their ‘fitness’ in the interest of survival and reproduction. A later proponent of evolutionary biology, Herbert Spencer, coined this idea into the phrase “survival of the fittest,” referring not simply to the strongest and most aggressive individuals who can bully their rivals and out-compete for females, but to any organism that can successfully adapt to its environment and find a provident niche where it can thrive. By putting this requirement on living things, nature has raised a gradient against the likelihood that genetic mutations and individual deviance will survive and reproduce, unless it can win this struggle for fitness.

In economics there is another force, which the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith saw at work in free-market capitalism, where rational self-interest and competition in business conspire toward ‘the wealth of nations’. As individuals and industries compete with each other for market share, the cost value ratio of what they offer to consumers keeps the quality of their goods or services from slipping out of favor. This is another kind of selection, and fitness here allows a commercial enterprise to survive and maybe spawn a new generation of innovations. Smith wasn’t praising selfishness in business but rather an interest in building one’s own competitive edge in delivering genuine value.

And in politics there is yet another force, which in liberal democracy has been called ‘the will of the people’ or ‘the general will’. The idea here is that the collective effect of individuals voicing and voting for what they want is a clarified expression of what is best for the body politic. In representative government the people elect officials who carry the responsibility of defending and promoting the majority interest of their constituencies. Not everyone gets what they want, but a broad base of shared value is eventually established where the security, freedom, and each individual’s pursuit of happiness can (at least in theory) be protected.

Now over many decades the Republican Party has been steadily undergoing a transformation of character, from the republic-defending, ethically centered, and unifying efforts of Abraham Lincoln, to what we have in Donald Trump. (Just put those two individuals side-by-side in your mind for a moment and you should start to feel the twisting vortex of cognitive dissonance.) Along the way, the Grand Ole Party sidled up to various special interest groups, some endeavoring to forward a few constitutional rights that are more period-specific than they want to admit (like the right to bear arms against the encroachments of a hostile government), and others seeking to bind our nation to a religious orthodoxy that historically has condemned the advances of science, the liberalization of morality, the creative authority of individuals, and the rise of inclusive community.There is a deep underground reservoir of repressed insecurity, resentment, and bigotry in our national unconscious, which has been kept below a thin threshold of civility – at various times not so successfully. As things progressed for liberal democracy, many of these inner demons made their way into legislation while others got projected onto whatever scapegoats we could find. Unfortunately this repressed shadow attached itself to the Republican Party, altering the platform from a philosophical avant-garde for individual freedom and social responsibility, to something just short (maybe) of institutionalized racism and bully politics. This is not Lincoln’s party, and it’s not what Americans aspire to be.

My theory is that this mysterious force called ‘the will of the people’ orchestrated the steady elimination of worthy GOP candidates and left us with this one very crass and blatantly bigoted contender for the presidency, for the purpose (not conscious, mind you) of pushing the Republican Party into extinction. If there is to be a resurrection at some point, Republicans will need to get their house in order.

The diagram above illustrates my newly refined definition of religion, as a cultural system that links together (from the Latin religare) individual consciousness (or psychology, represented in the purple triangle) and the larger order of existence (or cosmology, represented in the dome overhead) by means of sacred stories (or mythology, represented in the moving wave between them) that serve to orient us in space, guide us through time, connect us to one another, and support us across the adventure of life.

Once again, I am speaking here of religion itself, not necessarily of this or that religion, numerous examples of which have indeed lost this unifying function and fallen out of relevance in our day. I’ve explored in other posts what happens when religions misread their myths by taking them literally, defend outdated models of reality, and neglect (or even condemn) the inner depths of mystical awareness. They die, but continue on in fundamentalist orthodoxies, megachurch celebrity cults, metaphysical roadshows, or militant end-time sects.

Effective and relevant religion will provide the orientation, guidance, connection, and support that individuals and communities require throughout the full course of human development. Ultimately this will also include breakthrough realizations of a ‘truth beyond’ our conventional beliefs, and of a ‘power within’, deeper even than that cherished center of personal identity (i.e., ego) which religion itself (as theism) had earlier made the focus of salvation. This post-theist excursion into a more experiential, communitarian, and globally-minded spirituality is where the evolutionary design of our human nature is headed.

In a recent post I suggested that the narrative device of Apocalypse, which can be found in all developed mythologies, is not referring to a future cataclysm of world-collapse, but instead represents a self-conscious awareness inside the mythopoetic (storytelling) process itself, of their status as sacred fictions. Outside these narrative constructions of meaning is the present mystery of reality, the terminal end of our stories and thus of the storied world itself.

If mythology has done its work – referring to the orienting, guiding, connecting, and supporting functions mentioned earlier – then we are ready for a psychological breakthrough to a more rational, responsible, and reality-oriented way of life.

My term for this liberated mode of experience is ‘creative authority’: when the individual not only sees through the constructions that had earlier draped both reality and consciousness with veils of meaning, but goes on to take responsibility as the principal author of his or her own personal myth and its associated world. If it sounds like we’re returning to life under the shroud, I must emphasize the key insight of this breakthrough realization, which is that the individual is now a self-conscious storyteller.

In other words, we have entered the ‘ironic mode’ (Northrup Frye) where the storyteller is aware of the fact that he or she is spinning narratives across a mystery that cannot be named.

This brings us to the interesting challenge of composing our own personal myth. The art of storytelling (or myth-making) is millenniums old, which means that we have a vast library and useful tools at our disposal for the project before us. In this post I want to reflect on the features of well-developed character, using this term in its literary and not so much its moral (or moralistic) sense. A character is thus a narrative personification, an identity in story who strives (Greek agon) for (as protagonist) and against (as antagonist) the plot in its unfolding. A ‘good’ character (again, not in the moral sense) is one that evinces certain traits and makes the story particularly interesting.

Our work as self-conscious storytellers of our own personal myths will involve constructing an identity for ourselves that possesses four traits in particular: memory, integrity, grounding, and volition.

Memory

In any good story, character is an identity that becomes stronger (i.e., more definite and self-consistent) over time. A character’s memory has to do with how recognizable it is with respect to what we’ve already come to know about him or her in the story up to this point. The story’s audience starts to anticipate how a character will respond by virtue of how he or she behaved in similar scenes or challenges earlier in the narrative. With growing confidence in a character’s memory, they are better able to trust his or her performance.

As we take responsibility for the construction and management of our personal identity, each of us should consider the fidelity of our character to the person we have been. This is not to suggest that we simply repeat the mistakes of our past, or that spontaneity and fresh departures are out of the question. Even if we should undergo a conversion of some sort, the memory of character will deepen our understanding and empathy for others, adding dimension and complexity to the person we are. This is an aspect of what is known as wisdom. Alternatively, neglecting the character trait of memory can make us insensitive to others, even projecting on them the dark energies of our own repressed and forgotten shadow.

Integrity

If the character trait of memory is what establishes consistency through time, then integrity is about consistency across space, or across the landscape of life situations and social engagements. A narrative character who changes dramatically from one engagement to another leaves the audience unsure as to ‘who’ will show up next. In psychology this lack of consistency across situations is evidence of ‘dissociative identity’ (formerly ‘multiple personality’), where a personality lacks sufficient ego strength to coordinate and unify otherwise diverging streams of subconscious motivation and demeanor.

In the early years of ego formation when we were being shaped, instructed, and managed by our tribe into a compliant member of the group, identity contracts dictated our role in each social situation. Now, stepping through the Apocalypse and into our own creative authority, we can take ‘authorial control’ over the person we want to be. We can join the role-play, fully aware that it is just a social convention in make-believe. Or we might take a stand for a more authentic, self-honest, re-imagined and creative way of being together. This is what Jesus called the kingdom of God.

Grounding

A ‘grounded’ character in story doesn’t simply drift above the moving scenes, essentially detached from the situational dynamics of time and setting. He or she has the feel of belonging, of being rooted in that narrative world and not just an alien passing through. In this sense the story isn’t merely ‘about’ the character, but unfolds around and through the character’s individual evolution.

My returning reader will recognize this idea of grounding from my frequent references to ‘the grounding mystery’, that inner depth of spiritual life where our personal identity sinks and dissolves into an ineffable sense of being. Of course, if ego is caught in a neurotic tangle of insecurity and self-defense, any suggestion of sinking and dissolving into something else will be vigorously resisted, and inevitably misunderstood. Creative authority requires that we ‘loosen up’ and release ourselves to the deeper process, so that we can carry that ‘power within’ into the affairs of our daily life in the world.

Volition

Our fourth and final character trait picks up with that last sentence – as we take action and work out the evolving plot of our personal myth. In story, the action of a ‘weak’ character will be determined by external events and circumstances, whereas a ‘strong’ character chooses and determines it for him- or herself. Volition (from the Latin vol for will) is about a character taking action rather than reacting, moved by an internal drive or desire. The better stories in mythology, literature, film, and stage are those that are driven by strong characters whose action seems to proceed from their center.

As we break through from a mode of role performance (acting out the instructions and expectations of our tribe) to one of role transcendence (using our role in a more purposeful and creative way), we are able to construct a personal myth that supports the life and genuine community we really want. We don’t pick up a mask of identity (a persona) because someone else tells us to, because a tradition (or consensus trance) calls for it. We can live out of our own center, for values and aims that others might not find agreeable. Our action is not about defiance or transgression, but instead arches toward a deeper, higher, or longer goal.

More and more of us are ready for the responsibility of writing our own story, of composing our own personal myth. Our tribe and culture have done their part, for better or worse, and now it’s our turn. We have finally come to realize that our identities and the worlds we inhabit are really nothing more than narrative constructions, meaningful fictions of our personal and interpersonal life.

It is time to step into our own creative authority, take leave of the gods, and become fully human. This is life after the Apocalypse.